Knowledge Systems - John Tonkin

I don't think you can really talk about knowledge systems without talking about yourself. So I'm going to give you a little bit of personal history. When I was about 11 years old I started buying a magazine that costed me about 70c per week called 'All About Science'. For the next 120 weeks I would read 20 pages every week. I'll jump forward now to when I was 20 and I was in the third year of my science degree majoring in biological sciences. Much to my parents disgust I dropped out - I'd started hanging out with a bad crowd from Underdale, which is the Art School and got into photography and animation.

I felt quite a profound sense of disillusionment with how and what I was being taught. I started to read a lot of comparative religions and philosophies and generally immersed myself in this relentless searching and eventually got to a point where 'subjectivity' rescued me. It came to a point of understanding where we create our own reality. I was quite a knowledgeable person but it got to the point where I finally understood that knowledge is not everything.

Then in the late 80s and I started working for a scientist at the Department of Fisheries - a very interesting guy. He was quite diverse in his interests, he later went on to become the Chair of the Australian Network for Art and Technology amongst other things. He was a mathematical modeller of fisheries and what I was doing for him was building these graphical representations of what was happening in different fishery areas. These were used as educational tools to communicate with the fishers about what was happening - it's a whole series of animated graphs where you decide how much to fish each year.

It actually wasn't such a problem because people pay so much for their Abalone licenses that they tend to look after them.

We subsequently went on to work for shark fisheries which led to the Southern Shark Fishery being closed in South Australia for a couple of years. This was one of the first times in the world where a fishery closed down before it had been depleted. One of the reasons I bring all this up is because Phillip was very stringent in talking about his work as the fact that he was building models and that these models were not reality. In some ways he was quite unusual as a scientist, to be so upfront in acknowledging that. I think that a lot of people doing this work get so emersed in what they're doing that they don't really see the context of it.

I was just going to show this really quickly because at the time that I was working for Phillip I was working on a series of animations which were influenced by people like Oscar? and the Whitney Brothers. It was a fairly formal avant-guard experimental animation and through working with Phillip, I got the idea of mathematical modelling.

Joyce was talking about contemplation and with this piece I really wanted to create a contemplative space.

I'm going to show you a couple of projects that I then went on to do. This was in the mid-late 90s. I became interested in physics and did a series of projects basically looking at identity. I then became interested in physiognomy and language. Physiognomy was very big a couple of hundred years ago and it was the idea that you could read someone's character from their face.

I was interested in drawing parallels between what was happening a couple of hundred years ago and what was happen particularly in the late 90s when the human geno issue was just starting to happen and people were forever coming out and saying we found the gay gene, we've found the alcoholic gene, we've found the depressive gene.

These were questionable character traits that they seemed to focus on, so in this particular piece I'd made five different versions of my own face and then asked people to order the face according to these different categories. For the scientists in the room, somebody yesterday was talking about scientific method, I went to great extremes to random the order of questions and also the starting order of the faces, so you can see the result of these faces.

I didn't really have anything in mind when I made the faces, I just sort of played and sorted with the way they ended up - this guy here I think of as being Slavic and this guy here I think of as being Samoan (I kind of deliberately put him in because he's a little bit darker and unfortunately he really cops it). I've shown this work a couple of times and the data is remarkably consistent regardless of where I've shown it - even in different cultural settings. So you can see these two here pretty much fight it out go top billing. And this guy is unfortunately consider the least trust worthy, intelligent, least introverted (that's not such an issue) and he is the least homosexual. Now I'll read a couple of quotes which I came across at that time. I had a number of images also that had these character readings based on this guy JC Lovett in 1772. I'll just read a couple of these.

"We may without injustice conclude that through the benevolent kind there is native dullness. It would excite universal surprise should one possessing such features pronounce accurate decisions or produce work of genius."

And the actual real doosey which I found is this one here,

"Physiognomy takes cognisance of races and nations as well as of individuals. It holds that as physically there is a difference between the.. of the Far East who raises his miserable wigwam of twigs and turf and the civilised Caucasian from whose hands spring palaces of crystal which he crowns with triumph."

This is science and art. I became really obsessed with this language, how incredibly arrogant and self important it was and I'm not sure it's particularly gone away. I was trying to find a title for one of my works and started looking through my science dictionary. For some reason, I found myself reading the forward and I'll read this interesting quote, "Some Sociologists of science now teach that scientific laws are subjective, relative and ephemeral and like the laws of Marxism are upheld by cliques in order to establish and maintain their power. If that was so, then much of this dictionary would soon become as redundant as the central committee of the communist party." I won't go on any further.

Another sort of thing that I've been constantly interested in is our conscious obsession with progress and moving forward. This was a piece I did for Outreach and another, Personal Genics, I was really interested living in a culture that is so obsessed with progress and how we internalise that. I think in some ways we give ourselves a hard time and feel that we are meant to be getting better all the time. Both on an individual level as well as a cultural level. So I wanted to give people the opportunity to make themselves better in a simpler way. So in this piece you can upgrade yourself - the face in the middle is like the parent of each generation and the ones around the outside are the children of that parent. You choose which one of them survives to the next generation and you can do that on and on and on. When the piece is shown in a gallery context you get two print outs, one to take home and put on your fridge and another to stick on the wall. So I showed this at the Queensland Art Gallery at the beginning of last year and I got ten thousand faces, it was very exciting.

Now as with the other two pieces in the series there is a self portraiture aspect to these. I also had to put myself into this one so this is like myself as an evolution diagram. So as a single cell. That's my favourite there, the kind of creature. I overheard two girls talking to each other while they were looking at this print out and they were talking about where their boyfriends sat on the evolutionary scale. One of them was going, "My boyfriend would be about here." And the other one was saying, " I think mine's more about here".

This is a more recent work and it's quite interesting because I wanted to do something about our desire to understand ourselves in the world, which is both admirable but also absurd because we are never really going to understand things. The friction between those two is why I was interested in this. People were invited to record a theory into the machine and then the software looks for gaps between phrases and then uses that to mix them together to make new theories. You can also then vote on which theories you think are the most successful. I feel there's a humanness that comes through in this and yet it's making fun at the same time.

I now want to show you the piece that I am currently working on called 'Strange Weather ?A Granulised Theory of Self'. In this particular piece I've been recording such information as how much coffee I have a day, how much sleep get, how many minutes I spend on line, how much alcohol I drink (which is a little confronting) and the consistency of my shit and just various things like this. I'm also recording things like the barometric pressure in Cairo, Microsoft's share price and weather information. Now I'm in the process of building realisation software that is going to allow me to make sense of it all - as a tool for making sense of your life. This is the software that I've been playing around with and some of the graphics look like business graphs but a lot of them are just going to be messy blobs. When I show it in an installation context, I'm going to totally escalate it to monitor additional info like my heart rate, in more or less real time and feed that into the system as well. Thank you.

© John Tonkin 2002